Dancing in the Wind
by tenebricosa
Summary: It's a short and vague DracoHermione ficlet that anyone with a phobia of long sentences should avoid at all costs.


_I decided to write a story, labelled the documet appropriately, too. "Write a Story." It came out exactly how I wanted it to and at the same time it ran away from me, following its own course even while I tried to push it back into place, failing miserably as the characters decided their own path and pushed me away to write it all on their own. That was a warning. If that sentence sent you running for the red pen you might want to reconsider reading this at all. That said, it's a Draco/Hermione story that's as vague as vague can be. So leave a comment, make me happy, and tell me what you got out of it because I'm still deciding what I did._

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She walked down the street, her arms piled high with papers. They wobbled precariously in their stack, paper clipped packets and loose fliers teetering like the stacked plates in the sink where just one more spoon might send the whole pile crashing down in a mess of shattered pottery and broken glass. She moved her hands, adjusting them down at the bottom and put her chin on top, trying to sandwich the papers with her body. A car honked somewhere, a few streets away where cars fought with pedestrians for the right of way and one driver vented frustration with the unfavorable situation. She lifted her head to see, an instinct passed down from her hairy ancestors for whom the unexpected sound of a taxi honking could have been a tiger's growl, a portent of danger long before the beast appeared. As her chin raised from the top layer a wind blew down the avenue, a late autumn breeze laden with the scent of snow, a promise of winter to come, that ruffled the edges of her patterned skirt and the corners of her load and riffled through the space between the leaves, lifting them free of each other to dance for a few seconds, catching the sunshine and glinting a stark white against the city grey. They settled on the ground quickly as the wind moved on to find fresh playmates, ones unsullied by the gum-spotted ground.

She knelt, frantically scooping up papers before a new wind could come and pull them further from her grasp. She turned southward and was greeted by a tanned hand messily clutching a few white papers, their silver paperclips sticking out at odd angles from the bundle. They gathered up the rest of the papers mutely, the man and the woman, silently dedicated to the task. They finished their undignified scampering and stood, looking at each other curiously under guise of adjusting crooked suits and undone buttons, waiting for an exchange of words, like coins worn down from too much use, to end the awkward silence. She pulled a paper from her disorganized pile and a pen from her purse, catching his eye as she did and scrawled a few numbers on the page, no name, he knew that already, a few symbols more important than all the lines of printed text it had been rescued for, and thrust it at him, her face flushing with the strain of audacity. She walked away.

The two of them walked down a similar street, distinguishable from the first only by the white words on green signs. Neon lights flashed from behind clear glass, calling out to passers by of luxuries available inside, a courtship dance in stasis to any who cared to look, the peacock signs strutting silently in place, flashing their gaudy feathers to the night. They walked into the cold wind, her long brown hair slapping against her face and their scarves streaming back behind them in their own dance, twisting and twirling to get away, twining together, green and red in the reflected glow of the streetlamps, christmas in October. It blew stray litter into the air and she watched the pieces as she struggled not to be blown away herself. He grabbed her arm and pulled her with him into the walled in space outside a hotel, the reserved space empty of guests. They stood behind the barrier with flushed faces and mussed hair and looked at their still scarves and a smile broke out on her face, a contagious grin laden with strange emotion, the kind that the scientists are still looking for out in the jungles of the Amazon, searching desperately so they might categorize and bottle them, to give them a name and remove the mystery.

He drove while she gazed idly out the passenger window, taking in the languid cows with their soft black eyes and tails that twitched vainly against the crowds of flies that shared the meadows with them. The window was open just a crack, warm air streaming in and mixing with the air conditioned cool. Her eyes drifted open and shut, one hand resting on her stomach and the other tangled in the loose strands of her hair, brushing occasionally against the cool window glass. She turned to him and watched the intent concentration on his face as he watched in turn the pattern of orange dots and stripes on the black tarmac. She struggled for something to say, tense all of a sudden and uneasy in the company of this stranger, though not a stranger at all, with his strong, serious features, harsh and elegantly delicate all at once.

"I don't know," she said at all, simultaneously at a loss for words and finding the right ones to convey everything. "I don't know," she said again, tasting the words as they rolled off her tongue, a coarse mix of fear and uncertainty. He looked at her and she could see him stiffen, starting at his toes and working up to his face. He looked back to the road, necessity taking over, to once again stare at the alternating patterns of dots and dashes, with more than serious written on his face. She watched him for a while until they passed another field, this one devoid of cows and she looked away in surprise when she felt the car slow, his foot slipping off one pedal and onto another, his hands gently maneuvering the wheel to the right. His feet crunched on the dry dirt as he a few feet away from the car, waiting silently for her to join him until she did and they walked until they could no longer see the car, it having hidden itself behind a slight rise while they were moving away. She waited impatiently for him to say something, for him to break the silence which had never before seemed so unbearably awkward, tension created by a few words washing over her while it seemed to drain away from him. She turned to follow his gaze and hers skimmed over a field of corn that swayed gently in the wind, unconcerned with the frantic goings on of the city so far away or the two people standing at the edge of the road, their hearts as heavy as their feet by necessity, so that they would never be blown away in the wind tunnels of their city. The breeze picked up into wind, wind that blew over the field and the two people, people who finally let the wind blow them away.


End file.
